CHALLENGES OF RUNNING A BUSINESS WITH YOUR SPOUSE

Husbands and Wives in Business Together

Being an entrepreneur, self-starting business woman, and a wife is difficult. However, when you add in the dynamics of your husband being your business partner, things can get even more challenging. My husband and I have owned several businesses together and separately. The most successful businesses were the ones we worked on building together. They were also the most challenging business to manage because there were so many dynamics to doing it successful that clashed with our personalities, areas of passions, and work methods.

WHO IS THE BOSS?

That is the major hurdle that many couples have to establish. In our case, I had the business idea, but my husband was the business front man since he had the sales experience and passion for in person and phone sales. In his mind, he was the boss. In my mind, I was the boss. This bought challenges when it came to the goals of the business, who did what, who made the decisions, and of course the power struggle.

To fix this we had to:

·       Agree on mission of business

·       Create a business plan

·       Decide on how decisions were made

·       Divide areas of management determined by the person’s strength

·       Agree on expectations – write them down, make them visible

TIME MANAGEMENT

The other area that was hard to manage was our time. Since both of us needed to work the business, work our actual full time jobs, and parent our children, we had many times when we thought the other person was cooking dinner, putting the kids to bed or picking them up from school.

To fix this we had to:

·       Create weekly schedules

·       Assign each other or delegate task out

·       Cut time at full-time job (one of us) to part-time or hire a nanny

MAKE TIME FOR LIFE AND DATES

Sometimes the business takes over. It can cause stress to manifest in the personal relationship of the couple in business. Building a business is fun, exciting and like raising a child that you have more control over. If you aren’t careful though, it will consume everything you care about.

To fix this we had to:

·       Have standing date night – no talking business, kids, or work (we played board games, went to movies, or a day trip)

·       Take mandatory vacation (even if only for two days)

·       Do something special for each other, write notes to remind each other we love them, sneak off for breakfast.

·       Continue to work on our balancing act

By LM Preston, author of Building Your Empowered Steps and Homeschooling and Working While Raising Amazing Learners, www.EmpoweredSteps.com